Board Building Boot Camp 27 & 28 May

Following the EMIS reference Group meeting another two day board building boot camp will be held in Wellington for would-be WebEOC administrators.

The first day provides an opportunity for those with no programming experience to be trained in the basic WebEOC administrator support functions, allowing you to create new incidents, modify board permissions or add additional images to Map Tac.

This day runs in parallel to the 2 day board building camp. This is aimed at those in the sector with some experience of software development or coding and an existing knowledge of html. The first half day is spent learning the WebEOC specific html tags and the administrative functions that support board development before being let loose on the training & development server.

The intention is that those attending will have identified with their agency a requirement for a local board and will be able to have completed this board by the end of the two days with a view to moving it into production once it is performing as expected.

This event ran really well last November and this year we have made a number of spaces available to other agencies that use WebEOC, hoping to build a critical mass of grass roots level board developers and knowledge of WebEOC so that agencies can lever off each others efforts even in other sectors.

I'd love to see those who attended the November course back as well as it is a great opportunity to build some boards away from the distraction of the office and with the on-site support of Jeremy and Ian, Australasia's own WebEOC board-wizards.

If anyone is interested in attending please get in contact.

EMIS Reference Group meeting 26 May

The EMIS Reference Group will meet on the 26 May in Wellington for its 6 monthly meeting. The Group is made up of 12 agencies representing between them the four health regions as well as specific DHB, PHUs, Ambulance and Emergency Ambulance Communications Centre area of WebEOC use.

It has been an extremely busy 6 months for EMIS, with St John in particular working with a number of DHBs and EACC to use WebEOC for pre-planned events during the summer and a significant of work going on behind the scenes on the GIS front that Jeremy and I will be presenting to the group.

Issues raised at the reference group will be fed back to the sector through the various representatives at the quarterly regional emergency management meetings.

Martime NZ Oil Spill Exercise

Over the days of the 6th and 7th of April Maritime NZ held a exercise down in Dunedin to fully test their WebEOC system. Or as it is described in Martime, the IMS (Information/Incident Management System). Luckily i was able to attend and be involved within the incident as part of the IMS support along with Dave Russell from MNZ's IT team. The exercise was based upon a oil spill in the Otago harbour, and how the team was to respond/manage the whole incident from start to finish. The incident started of with a collision between a ship and a tug on passage while exiting the harbour. Resulting in several tonnes of oil spilling into the harbour. The NRT (National Response Team) was quickly dispatched to help Otago Regional Council deal with the spill. The exercise seemed to run very well, with a lot of work, energy and enthusiasim put in from many people from MNZ and Otago Regional Council. WebEOC was tested well within the NCC (National Communication Centre), out in the field from the Port Chalmers Yacht Club and back at the Wellington office from the DAT team, with minimal problems. People were able to add information to the main Log, compile IAP's, Add/Respond to tasks, Compile sitreps, Add Media Releases, Deploy equipment, Assign personnel, Add Vessell details, track oil release vs recovery, track costs and much more. Below are some action short from the NCC and the Field.
The Operations Team conversing very well
Admin and Logistics team hard at work
Wildlife Team
Planning Team
The NOSC Team, along with Neil Rowath floating in the background planning the next event within the exercise
The Health and Safety Team. - Thank you to Lynne Irving for providing the photo's
The IMS support team, concentraiting hard! :0)
MNZ staff out in the field preping themselves and the equipment
The MNZ cleanup boat used in the exercise
The Dunedin Harbour everyone was working hard to save!

Position Logging and Tasking in the running for Board of the Year

The Position Logging and Tasking boards have been submitted by ESI to the WebEOC community as one of five boards in contention for "Board Designer of the Year".

These boards form the core of our system and allow any users log entry to be raised to a significant event, visible to any agency involved in the response to that incident but the really clever feature is the work that Jeremy undertook after Ex Ruaumoko when the feedback was that any agency wanted to be able to send and track a task to any other agency. These tasks can be generated from anybodies log entry and then assigner to any combination of internal and external users. This allows your operations and planning teams to be aware of resource requests sent to other agencies.

Competition is always tough (especially as Jeremy from Critchlow won the 'Redline' award for pushing the WebEOC boundaries two years ago) and there are some great boards in the other entries, so I recommend you go and have a look at what other agencies have been working on.

I'd like to thank all of the agencies that have provided feedback during exercises, incidents, training and consultation that have provided the direction that this board has developed in, but really thank Jeremy for his work and skill in developing such an innovative solution to the tasking problem.

We can see the GeoNet Server but we can't synchronise the data!

Jeremy and I travelled out to Avalon to catch up with the GeoNet team within GNS to test out their newly configured WFS server.

GeoNet are in a fantastic building that used to be a film studio but seems more like the secret base of a James Bond baddie with some serious computers and data displays on the wall next to racks of climbing gear, electric drills, rock anchors, armoured cabling and satellite dishes - my kind of science! All of that kit is necessary to maintain the network of scientific sensors they have across NZ in some of the harshest alpine terrain under attack from the elements, earthquakes, volcanoes and the ever present Kea (alpine parrot).

The WFS server will in theory serve up a range of data allowing other agencies to point their GIS application at the server and add the data layers into their own system.

Unfortunately whilst we could see the server, and see the data layers available we couldn't get them to synchronise to Emergeo. This photo shows a lot of very clever people trying to work the problem out with little success.

Having emailed the Emergeo Technical Support team in Canada I have a patch to apply to our system as soon as I get a chance and we should be in business.

Other agencies that could benefit from real-time GeoNet data within their GIS system should contact the GeoNet outreach coordinator Sara Tresch.

Operationalising GeoNet

David Johnston hosted a meeting today at GNS Science in Avalon attended by representatives of GNS Science, including GeoNet, Massey University, including researchers from the Joint Centre for Disaster Research Kestrel Group and MCDEM.

The meeting focused on two issues - getting the GeoNet product, primarily the isoseismal maps and realtime shake maps into emergency operations centres to support operational decision making as well as exploring a number of research proposals in the pipeline around conducting NZ Based research into effective EOC decision making informed by scientific advice.

This problem was very well illustrated during Ex Ruaumoko, last year which looked at an increase in activity within the Auckland Volcanic Field and a critical decision point around evacuation. The challenge being an inverse relationship between time available and certainty of eruption.

Interoperability and appropriate standards were also discussed with reference to the current MCDEM procurement of an emergency management information system and the need to ensure a common operating picture can be shared across all agencies.

Thanks to David and Sara at GNS for hosting and organising this meeting and hopefully the work this week with GeoNet will establish a real time WFS server feed to Emergeo that other agencies can utilise as well.

Broadband Global Area Network

I attended the Wellington launch of NZ coverage for Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) services. Inmarsat (who own and launched the BGAN network) and Wrights (who provide satellite technology in NZ) provided some presentations followed by a hands on demonstration of the Thrane Explorer units that provide the voice and data access to the inmarsat satellites.

BGAN coverage has been extended to New Zealand following the launch last year of an additional Inmarsat 4 satellite that meant that the orbits of all three satellites could be reconfigured to provide global coverage. BGAN is mature well proven technology that has been available for a number of years in the rest of the world so it's great to finally have a range of options for satellite broadband in NZ.


A whole host of agencies and companies attended the launch including 'business as usual' customers who have remote monitoring data requirements as well as a range of emergency services and civil defence organisations from as far away as Canterbury, as well as some private companies and media.

The base station kit seemed to do what it said on the tin, all of the units are easily portable and have slightly varying data rates but essentially all support VOIP and data.

As this photo shows WebEOC loaded fine on the smallest base station - it would be good to do some more in depth testing especially with the Emergeo GIS Smart Client.

As well as the usual VOIP, data and streaming video capability it seems someone else had already had my bright idea and as an add-on unit you can establish a picocell within an Emergency Operations Centre in order to allow staff to continue to use their mobile phones even if the land-based mobile phone network is inoperable.

A number of agencies have already bought BGAN base stations in anticipation of coverage becoming available so it will be great to see the first domestic agencies deploying a similar capability to that which I saw Hutt Valley Emergency Management have with IPSTAR a couple of months ago.

I think as the importance of resilient data communications is recognised we will see agencies employing a range of options from ISDN, fibre, microwave, digital radio data, BGAN and IPSTAR depending on bandwidth and deployability requirements.



As an 'EOC in a bag' it would be hard to beat a BGAN, ruggedised laptop, mini printer and mini-data projector, unless you had something like this 4*4 complete with a satellite tracking dish on the roof and a wireless network to establish your VOIP, live video streaming and data links. Whilst this may seem far fetched setups like this are an established capability for many agencies overseas and need appropriate consideration.